Evolution of existing Powerline Communication technologies imposes a need to improve performances of the power line coupler, more specifically when it comes to the use of PLC communication solution in the low frequency bands (denoted LFB) going from a few KHz to few hundreds of Khz.
While a continuation of the U.S. pending patent application Ser. No. 13/227,891 entitled “Powerline Control Interface for Frequency and Amplitude Modulation Transmitter”, the focus of our invention remains at the Physical Layer in PowerLine Communications (PLC) environment.
Consequently the present invention was conceived to improve the performances of a Powerline Interface (PI), in the LFB plan, to transmit data on the power line by using (“pulling”) the required current (denoted: Current) from the power line and therefore reducing the overall power consumption of the transmit system to only few milli-watts required by the electronics of the PI.
As a consequence of this present invention, power dissipation issues in the LFB for some of the components directly connected to the power line are significantly reduced and therefore facilitating the deployment of standard modulation PLC solutions into forms factors that were not possible until now due to some reliability concerns.
Furthermore, the goal of the present invention is to provide a solution for the PLC Line coupler, which is independent of the type of PHY narrow band modulation (ASK, FSK, S-FSK, etc. . . . ) and the frequency band plan. With proper adaptation of some of the electronics, the invention can be used in any of the LFB relevant to the smart grid market, such as:                CENELEC (EU) A/B/C/D bands (3 Khz to 148.5 KHz),        ARIB (Japan) band (10 Khz to 450 Khz),        FCC (US) bands (10 KHz to 490 KHz)        